The pair have integrated the Wind River Studio Operator intelligent edge software with Encora’s engineering expertise
BARCELONA—Software provider Wind River and digital services provider Encora announced at MWC 2025 that they have integrated the Wind River Studio Operator intelligent edge software with the latter’s engineering expertise, and the full-stack NVIDIA AI platform to bring advanced AI-supported automation for mission-critical systems.
Notably, while the technology is being initially showcased for 5G Open RAN operations, it will provide secure, on-premise AI automation solution across various verticals including industrial automation, government, aerospace and security.
In a conversation with RCR Wireless News, Wind River Vice President of Product Management and Business Operations Randy Cox offered more detail about how the solution will save telcos (and enterprises more broadly) time and costs by getting to the root cause of network disruption much faster. Within the Wind River Studio Operator is an AI assistant that offers visibility into the network and monitors its health, he explained. “What this is really able to do it give a lot of information about what is going on in the network that today would take engineers to actually go and monitor… the AI Assistant get you to that root cause much quicker and provides multiple suggestions on what to do in the network to resolve that problem,” he continued.
The solution features on-premise AI automation, which enables intelligent operations without requiring cloud connectivity, while an air-gapped deployment on NVIDIA accelerated computing provides enhanced security and data sovereignty. The solution also integrates with other Studio Operator technologies and features natural language interaction for system management, which the company said will allow operators to efficiently oversee and optimize operations through intuitive, AI-powered commands.
“By making AI-driven automation more intuitive and accessible, Wind River and Encora are setting a new standard for intelligent infrastructure management across industries,” Wind River said in a press release. Today, it’s a forward-looking technology that Cox said will be commercially available sometime in the next 12 months.
When asked more broadly about how telcos are approaching AI and they feel about the concept of AI helping them run their networks, Cox emphasized that while Wind River Studio Operator tells a telco (or other enterprise) what’s going on in its network and will even suggest how to resolve an anomaly or failure, it won’t take any action. In generally, telcos are pretty comfortable with that level of AI and automation. But otherwise? “This whole AI thing? I think operators are going to be very, very cautious,” he said.
Wind River, however, is still looking ahead to enabling closed-loop automation, or a system in which AI does in fact take action. Its operator platform is actually comprised of four different elements: The integrated cloud platform, which is the product’s foundation; an analytics software package; an automated operations conductor; and then a containerized version of open stack.
“Closed-loop automation takes the analytics piece, which is looking at the network and figuring out what’s going on from a health perspective… and then the conductor actually performs actions automatically,” Cox explained. “We’re linking those together, so you can imagine the analytics portion that’s looking at the health of the network, determining that there’s something going on in the network that is a problem… and when it figures out … how to fix that, it then tells the conductor, ‘hey, go do XY and Z to the cloud platform itself.’ That right there, that closed loop, is… a step further than AI.”
Will telco ever get there — to this point where they take their hands off the wheel, allowing AI to completely run their operations? “I think they will get to some form of closed-loop automation… but I think what’s going to happen… is that when you they to the action part, they’re going to want to stop and be given an option to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’… they’re going to use it as much as they can without letting it take over the network,” said Cox.
